The place where I page to when my brain is full up of stuff about the Microsoft platform

I was on tour last week at @SQL_Relay and gave a talk on CosmosDB at To SQL, or not to SQL: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The tweets and articles of outraged fanatics, Or to code structured queries against a sea of data, And by opposing end them?… Read more

Data Science and machine learning are very cool just now and It’s relatively easy to find lots of resources to learn either from books to MOOCs (massively Open Online Courses). But how can you prove you are an expert? The Microsoft tradition and one that I have followed in the past is to get certified… Read more

In my last post and generally I like to talk up how useful a data science approach is to understanding your data but in this post I want to sound a note of caution as it can be easy to get carried away and generally if the results look to good to be true that’s… Read more

I go to a lot of computer events and I feel for the organisers when 80 have registered and only about 30 turn up. I am not sure why the no shows feel it’s OK not to spend a few seconds on Meetup or EventBrite to cancel, as a matter of common courtesy. Anyway rant… Read more

In the dark days of the last millennium data scientists were serious statisticians using exotic hardware, expensive software and were largely isolated from the rest of the organisations they worked for. Today the cloud and open source languages like R & Python have made this technology available to anyone curious enough to be interested in… Read more

Have you got your subscription under control particularly if you are on MSDN or a smaller budget and it’s just you or a small team using it? If you aren’t sure then read on; else Coffee. Here’s the problem we all forget to turn stuff off or kill it when we don’t need it which… Read more

I am in the middle of preparing for some more events the next big one being a day of machine learning (ML) at SQL Saturday Exeter. The organisers asked me to make a short video to explain what I’ll be covering and that got me to thinking about what my advice would be having worked… Read more

I am always one of the first to try new stuff when it comes out and so it was great for Microsoft to give me job doing this some 99 months ago. One of the latest things I signed up for was the Azure SQL Data Warehouse (ADW), and then setup a demo ADW so… Read more

About a decade a go I went on a Microsoft BI boot camp which was also attended by Microsoft staff specifically Matthew Stephen and Rob Gray who inspired me to work towards joining Microsoft myself. Two years later I got in and haven’t looked back and I still track Matt on LinkedIn, so I was… Read more

If you have ever watched the Star Trek First Contact film the crew allude to the fact that the star ship Enterprise is named after the first space shuttle, when actually it’s the other way around the first space shuttle was so named because over 2 million star trek fans lobbied NASA to call it… Read more